Availability

Continuous availability is a necessity for mission-critical business applications in a global world. It’s also a key component of the xDTM standard. DocuSign delivers 99.99% platform availability, regardless of the time of year, day of the week, time zone or country.

Designed from the ground up for continuous availability

Our technology architecture has enabled us to deliver over 99.99% platform availability to our customers and users worldwide over the past 24 months. This is accomplished through a combination of advanced high availability architecture, native DocuSign engineering, and both specialized and commodity hardware and software components.

How our architecture works

At its core, our technology architecture is powered by real-time data synchronization across two geographically disparate active sites. This architecture allows entire sites to be taken offline for maintenance without impacting live customer transactions and allows the overall system to survive full site outages. As an added benefit, multiple active sites also allow for load balancing to withstand usage spikes generated by customers, without sacrificing performance.

Decoupled documents and transaction data

Physically separating document (BLOB) data and transaction (OLTP) metadata into separate subsystems makes a multi-active architecture possible by optimizing storage and synchronization differently by data type. Decoupling also allows the underlying hardware for each data type to be upgraded independently, making for faster and more cost-effective scalability.

6x2 data storage

All customer data is stored up to six times across two geographically disparate locations, providing a superior level of data integrity and protection against data corruption.

Native DocuSign document storage infrastructure

All documents are stored using a native DocuSign storage infrastructure custom designed to maximize BLOB storage performance and enable accelerated self-healing when any redundant components are offline for any period of time.

GARTNER GROUP

Next Practices in Application Architecture: What We Learn From Big Web Sites 29 November 2012, Ross Altman. Refreshed 4 March 2014

A global-class system must deliver low latency, continuous availability, ironclad security and instantaneous recoverability — basically, all the attributes you would expect of an application that forms the backbone of enterprise operations.